ABSTRACT
It was a realisation as early as 1983 of the difference in learning strategies between students in the East and the West that incited my interest in seeking to understand how people learn – I have recorded the story many times of how it happened (e.g. Jarvis 2008) and so I will not rehearse it again here. However, as a result of many years of studying learning (Jarvis 1987, 1992, 2006, 2009, inter alia) and teaching and lecturing in many different countries, I realised that there are fundamentally different ways of looking at the world and learning from it which are culturally-based rather than hard-wired into each human being, but I have not fully understood the learning process and while this paper will take my studies a little further, it still leaves us with ultimate and unanswered questions. We have always understood learning to be a function of teaching and in my own work I have argued that it is also a function of person, so that I (Jarvis 2009, 25) defined it as:
This definition, whilst full, still leaves a number of questions about learning unanswered, such as what is the nature of the person and how is the person formed? I (Jarvis 2012) have briefly responded to the first of these questions when I argued that it is the person who learns and the person comprises body (brain) and mind – both of which learn. This is not a simplistic dualist position but a non-reductive monist one in which brain and mind are regarded as being the same substance but having different
functions. The question about how or what learning is and how it contributes to the formation of the person is a most complex one that has involved many eminent researchers. This paper relies heavily on their work as it seeks to demonstrate some elements of this process, which also highlight how learning differs from East to West. However, the starting point has to be the recognition that the human being has a long evolutionary history in which the external forces of the natural world have exerted pressures on the hominid species resulting in phylogenic learning. Basically, the body responded to these external pressures and adapted to the conditions it experienced. Another way of putting this would be that the body has learned. One of the first processes of learning that we all undergo, even before our birth, is bodily learning: the foetus grows and develops in the womb. For instance, the foetus ‘experiences’ sounds, tastes, and so on. Tremlin (2006, 51) summarises this:
This process is both reactive and pre-conscious learning – the brain is already beginning to function and neurons are being connected before birth. At birth, however, the foetus becomes an independent body, which includes the brain, and which, from the moment of birth, is exposed to a multitude of external pressures and sensations to which it also has to react and adapt in order to grow and develop.
